looked at a dr. bronner's bottle for the first time in a while and noticed that the company has started to make posthumous edits to the good doctor's Moral ABCs; I'm sure the soap is still fine but man that's really fucking up the vibes
linguist & software engineer in Lenapehoking; jewish ancom trans woman.
since twitter's burning gonna try bringing my posts about language stuff and losing my shit over star wars and such here - hi!
looked at a dr. bronner's bottle for the first time in a while and noticed that the company has started to make posthumous edits to the good doctor's Moral ABCs; I'm sure the soap is still fine but man that's really fucking up the vibes
they had a full on professional design firm (pentagram possibly?? is what my memory is telling me) do a pass over the product labels a few years back and yeah the vibes aren’t great. reliable soap tho
yeah like I noticed that they cleaned up the graphic design and typography at some point but as far as I could tell left the text intact, so I didn't really mind it
changing the text is a real mistake
I remember reading the bottle of bronners soap that my housemates kept and some of the stuff on there is pretty dog whistle-y.
I understand that it's got a weird vibe -- but despite that, the original text on those bottles was written by a jewish man who barely managed to escape nazi germany, so I do believe he wrote it in a genuine spirit of wanting humanity to realize its commonality before our hatred destroyed us all
zero endorsement of anything the company added to the bottles after he died in 1997 though
Weirdly enough GQ of all places had an interesting writeup on the generational shift behind Dr. Bronners' as a company:
https://www.gq.com/story/dr-bronners-corporate-success
It starts off on the requisite "hey look how wacky this place is", but it settles into an interesting thread about the revitalization of the company & how Bronner's grandkids had to figure out the difference between the mythology of Dr. Bronner & the more complicated parts of his legacy (and how to carry forward)